Let Queer Photo Archive 'All of Us Stars' Keep You Company This Holiday

Like many trans people across the country, I am far away from home this Thanksgiving, unmoored from familial relationships and the traditions that formed the guiding structure of my childhood. In the vast emptiness of adulthood, I've built from nothing a home without a home, filled with art and love and music and family away from family, thrice removed but closer than what came before.

Like the years before, we've come together to eat, drink, rewatch Desperately Seeking Susan and play around in my vintage polaroid collection, the remains of which litter my fridge and shelves and photo albums. We are not the first to make our own home, and we are not the last. Across the world, I feel connected to every other pocket of queer people carving out our own families and likenesses as the seasons change once more and the new year approaches.

Enter Busnach's photography, which depicts the transformation of his own dilapidated Upper West Side apartment into a haven for friends and family he transformed through his work. As Reference Press writes, "The images present the home as a queer, transgressive and transformative space of communion, celebration and strife. A place where a group of fierce friends, runaways and wannabe stars came together to play out their fantasies of fame through photography."

Through the anachronistic stylings of vintage and then-modern clothing, alongside the visual references to classic Hollywood starlets and fashion photography, give the archive a timeless quality that feels at once instantly relatable and a million miles away. I cannot, since being gifted a peek into the collected works, stop staring at these photos, transported as I am into the fantasies of Busnach's subjects.

Following Bobby Busnach's passing, All of Us Stars has been edited and organized by Seana Redmond, with essays and texts written by Amelia Abraham and Jackson Davidow, lending critical insight into over a hundred never before seen works.

So, whether at home, with friends, a family of one's own, or out to eat, remember that we are never truly alone in this life — certainly not to ourselves, and not to the communities and families and friends we pull into orbit around us. Now, if you'll excuse me, I have pie in the oven and some photographs to take of my sisters and friends.

All of Us Stars is published by Reference Point and is available at Printed Matter.

Photos courtesy of Reference Press and the © Estate of Bobby Busnach, 2025.